Dear England: What's shaping your narrative?

As Dear England kicks off on BBC One, Ivan Radford reflects on the road to victory.

‘A new story. A new England.’ That’s the goal of Gareth Southgate in Dear England, BBC One’s four-part series about his tenure managing the England men’s football team. The drama, adapted from James Graham’s play of the same name, concludes this Sunday and Monday evening. It arrives just before the football team once again faces the real challenge of the men’s World Cup – and all the expectations and fears that come with it.

Southgate’s approach to managing the team, as Graham has written it, is game-changing. He realises that he and the players are storytellers. A key psychological part of the problem, as he understands it, is that when it comes to telling England’s story, we are too eager to skip to the end – the bit where we win. We want to snap our fingers and get straight to the third act of Return of the Jedi, rather than journey through the whole trilogy before then. And when we try to jump to the end, without the patience to do the work first – understanding each other, building support and trust – we don’t succeed.

Why has success eluded the team for so many decades? To answer that requires confronting more than 30 years of hurt, mistakes and disappointment. That involves unpacking fears and all that pressure, and practising taking penalties – something Southgate, of course, is all too familiar with. In real life, after Southgate resigned in 2024, the men’s football team are still working towards that elusive third act of a victorious final. The story is still being told.

As Christians, we can be tempted to be impatient too. We can start with the end in mind, but not want to journey through the development required to get there. While Christlike perfection is the goal, it’s an ongoing process of transformation and renewal, because only God is truly perfect.

While that transformation is worked out by God in us, we can easily fall into the trap of setting our own values and goals, which are easier to achieve. We can use Scripture to justify those, rather than start with God and be shaped by the values of his Kingdom. That can include many different parts of our lives, from our career ambitions or views on politics to even our dreams for our football team or country.

In 1 Corinthians 9, Paul encourages the church in Corinth to ‘run in such a way as to get the prize’ (v24), but highlights the importance of self-discipline along the way. 1 Timothy 4:7 reminds us to ‘train yourself to be godly’, while Hebrews 12:1 calls us to have ‘perseverance’ as we run ‘the race marked out for us’ – not the race that we have marked out for ourselves.

If we try to skip to the end spiritually, we can accidentally attempt to fit God into the box of the world around us. We can be swept along by its currents, rather than listening to our unchanging God, who never contradicts his word, remains true to his loving character and existed long before penalty shootouts were invented. When we do that, we reduce the potential for other people to hear the good news of the gospel, but we also knock out the joy from our following Jesus. The story of our own relationship with God might be as bumpy as the World Cup group stages, but it’s a story that comes with the guarantee of God’s presence, love and hope.